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, though the girls have separate beds. Quite how the family afford to let the son take up his scholarship to secondary school is not clear. Unemployment and the debilitating effects of being in a pool of casual labour are stressed throughout the film. For Peter and his wife, it is a constant accompaniment to their lives. For the officer, Ben, it is harder to bear, affecting his relationship with Nora. Though Nora is working
in 2013, the youth unemployment rate had just reached a staggering high of 56%, a rate second only to Greece. The social conditions of the 1970s and 1980s in Spain have more recently been re-evaluated in the documentary Quinqui Stars, which was directed by Juan Vicente Córdoba in 2018. Significantly, in its collaboration with the rap artist el Coleta, the documentary interrogates cine quinqui and the historical period in which it was produced through sound. Presented and narrated by el Coleta himself, the documentary combines original scenes
investigate the ways in which humour is deployed for dramatic and emotional effect in the context of scenarios dealing with such seemingly non-comic subjects as mass unemployment, failed or uneasy relationships, bitter family disputes, or instances of racial tension and conflict in British society. I will seek to demonstrate that the interaction of comic and dramatic modes of narration within the films discussed proved to be a
3 Thatcherism and South Yorkshire Looks and Smiles, Unfinished Business, Fun City, Threads In this chapter, we trace the aesthetic and political effects of the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government on Hines’s writing. His screenplay for the 1981 film Looks and Smiles takes an art-Âcinematic form to explore the pressures of the era’s unemployment on young people, in his fourth and final collaboration with Ken Loach. By contrast, Hines’s novel Unfinished Business (1983) examines the possibilities of social freedom, in this narrative about the
, finally collapsed. Alienated by state corruption and secrecy, frustrated with massive unemployment and failing economic policies, thousands of young demonstrators took to the streets to protest. The army responded by firing on the people. By the end of the month, five hundred demonstrators had been shot dead and the relation between people and government had altered irrevocably. October 1988 has been described as ‘the climax of
Amateur cinema established itself within middle-class circles during the 1930s, when Britain’s unemployment reached almost three million. 1 What prompted the making and showing of numerous films about working people during years of mass unemployment, particularly in the industrial regions of the North West? Government initiatives, public debate, media reports and the observable reality of people – specifically the
This is the first book-length study of one of the most significant of all British television writers, Jimmy McGovern. The book provides comprehensive coverage of all his work for television including early writing on Brookside, major documentary dramas such as Hillsborough and Sunday and more recent series such as The Street and Accused.
Whilst the book is firmly focused on McGovern’s own work, the range of his output over the period in which he has been working also provides something of an overview of the radical changes in television drama commissioning that have taken place during this time. Without compromising his deeply-held convictions McGovern has managed to adapt to an ever changing environment, often using his position as a sought-after writer to defy industry trends.
The book also challenges the notion of McGovern as an uncomplicated social realist in stylistic terms. Looking particularly at his later work, a case is made for McGovern employing a greater range of narrative approaches, albeit subtly and within boundaries that allow him to continue to write for large popular audiences.
Finally it is worth pointing to the book’s examination of McGovern’s role in recent years as a mentor to new voices, frequently acting as a creative producer on series that he part-writes and part brings through different less-experienced names.
American mistranslation ‘Bicycle thief’) is unemployment and all that followed from that (needing a bicycle, losing a bicycle, trying to recover a bicycle): that is, the dissatisfaction was primarily social, easily identified and resolvable. The narrative of it was straightforward and clear. However distressing the social reality depicted, it could be, unproblematically, depicted. Dissatisfaction in Antonioni’s films is different: it is centred on an inability to grasp oneself and to relate to others and primarily because of the indefiniteness, the lack of clarity and
contrary, they are not eligible to be employed as salaried workers (unlike directors, editors and cinematographers, for example), and are therefore also unable to claim benefits during the inevitable periods of unemployment. The precarious system of remuneration is based on copyright transfer (cession de droits) administered by the SACD, with a so-called ‘guaranteed minimum’, a sum negotiated with the
population size, with 2,669,900 people living there. The socio-economic profile of the population is marked by low levels of ethnic diversity, lower educational attainment levels and a higher level of unemployment than the national average (ONS, 2019 ). In terms of film consumption, adults living in the North East are less likely to go to the cinema than people in any other English region, at 47.8% as compared to the English average of 57.8% (DCMS, 2018 ). In part, this is tied to the levels of cinema provision. In addition, although there is a good level of multiplex